Archives for October 2012

Technology can have unintended consequences. The automobile was designed to get people from here to there. What perhaps wasn’t foreseen at first was the changes it would have on society. The car enabled people to flee the cities and move to the suburbs. The structure of how we all live and work was completely transformed.

The car certainly defined the 20th Century. What will define the 21st Century? Hand held devices like the iPod or iPad are off to the early lead. If you are sitting at home your iPad probably isn’t far from your reach. Outside, people no longer really look where they are going because they are checking their email on the iPhone. We have even had to pass laws to get people to stop talking on the phone while driving.

There have been a lot of direct consequences of the iPad and devices like it. It has already transformed our leisure life. It has taken all of the media and games we consume and brought them to us in a new way. One of the things that made it so effective was how adaptable it was and how much you could personalize it. [Read more…]

David Brooks tries to make some pretty interesting revisionist history in his column in The New York Times today. Too bad it’s completely untrue. Brooks writes

Al Gore released his movie “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. The global warming issue became associated with the highly partisan former vice president. Gore mobilized liberals, but, once he became the global warming spokesman, no Republican could stand shoulder to shoulder with him and survive. Any slim chance of building a bipartisan national consensus was gone.

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There are a lot of National Awareness Days. October 1 is World Vegetarian Day. October 3 is National Poetry Day. If Dr. Drew Ramsey and Chef Jennifer Iserloh have their way October 2 will become National Kale Day. Here is their mission: National Kale Day celebrates kale’s incredible health benefits, highlights kale’s culinary versatility, and […]

It’s not news that global warming is destroying ocean ecosystems by increasing the acidification of the water. Higher levels of carbon dioxide raise the acidity of the water. And this isn’t just theory. We are already seeing the effects. Oysters are already dying in greater numbers in the Pacific Northwest according to Elizabeth Grossman: Ocean […]

Vinod Khosla would like all of us to be a lot more ambitious; even other VCs are too risk averse in his mind. In his new paper, Black Swans Thesis of Energy Transformation he argues that The looming twin challenges of climate change and energy production are too big to be tacked by known solutions […]

When GM first announced the Volt would be offered under the Chevy brand, the promise seemed to be that the company would sell an electric car that middle America could afford. With a current sticker price of $39,145 before tax incentives, that is decidedly not the case. According to The New York Times Last year, […]

Best-selling author, David Kidder, has come out with a new book, The Startup Playbook, which has interviews with many of today’s most successful entrepreneurs, from Caterina Fake (Flickr) to Elon Musk (Paypal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors). While you get their own personal stories in great detail, its also the story of the modern American economy. There aren’t […]